My genius is reading comprehension. This allows me to completely absorb anything I set my mind to understanding, as long as it isn’t abstract mathematics, heavy science, or a foreign language. I also have performing genius, in that I’m a natural, and don’t get nervous in front of an audience. The tougher the audience, the better I get. That last part is character, physical conditioning & strength of will.
So when it comes to English language literature, I’m well read. Beginning in fiction, I’ve read Dr. Seuss, Peanuts, and plenty of kids stories. All the classic short stories from middle school including The Power of the Written Word, The Lottery, The Most Dangerous Game, etc… were absorbed. High school stuff like Lord of the Flies, The Pearl, The Iliad, Odyssey, etc… were read & comprehended.
Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Jack London, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy & Naguib Mahfouz have been experienced. You should read them too. John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway & William Faulkner are major 20th-century novelists. Also read Brave New World, Catch-22, Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, A Scanner Darkly, etc… to be (minimally) up-to-date modern. As far as fiction goes, just about all the great novels have already been written, so that’s where you start if you want to be literate.
As for non-fiction: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V.I. Lenin & Leon Trotsky as essential political writers & theorists. If you haven’t read them, then you are politically ignorant. Marxism, specifically Trotskyism, will carry you through philosophy, so you can overwhelm all the pseudo-intellectual nonsense of post-modernism, structuralism, etc…
In short, all these false philosophical systems of bourgeois ethics are post-WW2 constructs, meant to apologize for capitalism’s destructive & unequal class nature. It is purely subjective irrationalism, with the unknowable always flowing back to ‘god’– therefore rejecting science & rational thought. The hypocrisy of it all is that these post-modernist university intellectuals compose their treatises on computers, and would be lost on facts without the internet. Most never attend church.
Reading the World Socialist Web Site daily, is now a requirement to be a modern Marxist. What you come to learn over time & diligent study is that many of the arguments, tactics & strategies with which the ruling class uses to attack & manipulate the masses have already been done before. This is where that cliché’, “you need to know history in order not to repeat its mistakes,” comes into play. Once armed with Marxism down to your marrow, then you can go out and become a significant political force in the world, instead of becoming someone else’s pawn.
In the 21st century, the written word is now consumed online, and blogs changed news delivery forever. What is a blog? A blog is anything the creator wants it to be. My imagination took this to mean a blog to be an online newspaper, or newsletter. In the 1900’s, news was delivered by print newspapers, magazines & books. Books took the longest to publish, meaning they were the most out-of date, but the most in-depth. Magazines split the difference by being more in-depth & timely, while newspapers were up-to-date with headlines, but the least in-depth.
With a 21st century blog, a blogger can publish up-to-the-moment articles, and then expand upon them with a scrolling blog such as mine. There’s also social media now, which revolutionized information sharing. A good 20th century newspaper had quality in all sections: News: global, national, state & local; Sports: MLB, NBA, NFL, tennis, and anything else relevant to American sports fans; Arts & Entertainment: music, film, television, video games, etc; and a Comics section: meaning can you make your readers laugh?
The question then becomes: is it serious? Most politics is a joke. The entire establishment media is fixed by big money. The billionaires control both political parties, and no one else can even get on the ballot anymore, much less any media coverage. This is due to extreme political prejudice in the judicial system from the same kind of professional liars that are attempting to extradite Julian Assange.
How do you feel about Julian Assange? That reveals your true political position. Black Lives Matter is a campaign run by the Democratic Party, the same at #MeToo. It’s purpose is to divide the workers & youth racially, to prevent them from unifying in solidarity against the ruling class. That is the propaganda war which the Trump administration & the Democrats are threatening to escalate into a shooting war.
Trump’s provocations come in a daily torrent of hatred & ignorance, yet they go unchecked by the Democrats. The mass media message is vote Biden on November 3. Trump’s ordering the assassination of Michael Reinoehl, an anti-fascist protester from Portland gunned down Sept. 3 by police belonging to the federally-led Pacific Northwest Violent Offenders Task Force, is not grounds for impeachment according to the Democrats. Phony “Russian collusion” charges are impeachable offenses for the Democrats. Both sides are evil, and 100% wrong in the mad charade. Meanwhile COVID-19 rages unchecked, as do wildfires & global economic catastrophe.
The only rational & serious solution is Permanent Revolution. The ruling governments, and their corporate-military-intelligence-police apparatuses must be smashed. The police & military must be broken up, and reorganized into a working people’s militia. The Nazis must be rooted out, and disarmed. The intelligence apparatuses, from the NSA, CIA, FBI, ICE, must all be disbanded, and their dirty secrets exposed completely– names, photos, dates, places, etc…
This is the only serious political solution to prevent the ruling classes from starting a World War. The American economy needs to be shut down, with massive unified strike action from workers & students, to halt this murderous back-to-work (school) campaign. This means overthrowing the union labor bureaucracy. These parasites with mafia backing must be outed and brought to justice. This criminal underworld has historically worked with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and the CIA, in countless blood-stained adventures which have been kept hidden from the American public since their inception. Every union apparatus is corrupt, in that they always partner with corporate ownership, while betraying their rank-and-file constituents.
The workers & youth of the world will not tolerate a uncontrolled coronavirus pandemic as the “new normal.” Global warming has reached a tipping point, where if we don’t get serious now, it’s going to be a bleak future. The mass majority rejects this presidential ‘race’ with only the choices being between an ignorant unstable sociopath, and a zombie Wall Street warhead.
The Socialist Equality Party is running Joseph Kishore for President and Norissa Santa Cruz for Vice President. The point of this campaign is not to win the Electoral College, since that is impossible under the US two-party straitjacket. The SEP is the party of Trotsky, which means international revolutionary socialism.
That is a policy which EVERY ruling class around the world fears & despises. That is why Trotskyists are blacklisted, and Marxism slandered. Trotskyism has nothing to do with terrorism & the BLM campaign, and yet every act of political violence by anarchists & provocateurs against the establishment, is taken by Trump as an opportunity to incite his fascist supporters to shoot their guns at Marxists. That’s how fascist propaganda works, and the Democrats are all-in on it.
This is the reality of being a Trotskyist. It takes a lot more than intellect & learning. It also requires true courage & fortitude. This is the polar opposite of publicly wearing a BLM slogan. That is opportunism, and it pays well for a reason.
Not a single supporter of Black Lives Matter can seriously explain the assassination of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. The primary reason is because so few BLM advocates have actually read their works. Therefore they don’t understand their positions. Instead, they rely on others to tell them what these leaders meant. The problem there is that the leaders of the Nation of Islam (black militants), and the future NAACP (black Democrats), were involved in these political killings, with help from the NYPD & FBI. What about the killings of Tupac & Biggie? If black lives matter, then black lies matter. None of these fakers can face that, or the greater truth, which is that all lies matter.
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